Family planning cuts irk activists

President Barack Obama has been in office for just over a week, but already he has managed to upset some top leaders in a key constituency — women’s groups — after he personally intervened to get family planning funds stripped from the House stimulus package.

Planned Parenthood led the charge, with President Cecile Richards sending an “urgent” e-mail to supporters on Wednesday decrying the deletion — calling it a “betrayal of millions of low-income women, and it will place an even greater burden on state budgets that are already strained to the breaking point.”

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“I’m stunned,” she wrote, urging supporters to call the White House.

Other prominent women leaders joined in expressing their disappointment at Obama’s move — which came after Republicans turned up the heat on Obama by highlighting the family planning proposal in the House bill to spur conservative opposition.

Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, said she met with Democratic leaders in Congress Tuesday and received repeated assurances that the money will be restored in another way — but she made clear she’s watching.

“I think the [Obama administration] should have kept it in there,” Gandy said Wednesday in an interview. “But in their political calculus they felt this was something that would pass Congress rather easily as a stand-alone measure and didn’t think was worth fighting for in the stimulus.”

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Mary Jane Gallagher, president and CEO of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, said she was “devastated” by Obama’s decision.

But she added, “He’s made commitments to fund family planning and do it quickly. ... The president had a tough choice, and he told us he was going to make them and we have to stick with him, and I’m sticking with him because I fully expect really quick action on this,” said Gallagher.

Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs confirmed that Obama personally called Rep. Henry A. Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and asked him to drop the provision, just a day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended it on national television Sunday morning.

The president “believed that the policy of increased funding for family planning was the right one,” Gibbs said. “He didn’t believe that this bill was the vehicle to make that happen.”

All of the women’s leaders stopped well short of blasting the new White House over the move — appearing not to want to split with the Obama administration so quickly out of the gate and also confident that Obama stands by them in the long run on the issues they care about most.

As Gandy said, “We were definitely told that the Obama administration has a strong commitment to women’s reproductive rights and family planning. This should not be seen as a lessening of that commitment, only as a change of the vehicle.”

But Obama also made clear in recent days that he’s willing to disappoint some of his most ardent supporters in the abortion rights movement to win what in his mind amount to larger political victories.

Last week, Obama seemingly did his best to downplay his decision to reverse U.S. policy that prevented international organizations that offer abortions from receiving American aid money.